1--What is the title of your latest release?
THE EMMA PROJECT
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
She believes love is a lie. He believes love is the only truth there is. They both believe they can save the world (or a little piece of it), but only if they can find a way to work together despite the fierce sexual chemistry that can ruin everything.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
The book is set in a family that’s descended from Indian royalty where the oldest son is running for California governor. I wanted to explore privilege in the immigrant South Asian American community and the San Francisco Bay Area gave me a lot of layers to explore.
4--Would you hang out with your heroine in real life?
Absolutely. Naina is a badass who suffers no fools and sees the world with incisive clarity. Exactly my favorite kind of person.
5--What are three words that describe your hero?
Generous. Funny. Superhot.
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
That childhood trauma strikes deep roots and that every character however dark is redeemable with love and has light inside.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I’m somewhere between those two. I write a quick and dirty first/discovery draft, but I do make minor edits as I find my way through it.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
Biryani, spiced long grain rice slow cooked with meat (usually lamb or chicken). I’m obsessed with it.
9--Describe your writing space/office!
I write all over my house. But I like a sunny spot in my sunroom the most. My actual office is filled with books and pictures and is never fully tidy.
10--Who is an author you admire?
Kristan Higgins. No one makes me laugh and cry as hard as she does while also making me ponder life and the true nature of love. All within one book. Often within one chapter.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. It was the first mainstream English language book I read that had Indian protagonists who lived and acted like me. Not only was the prose so seamless and beautiful that I fell into the story body and soul, but for the young writer in me, finding a book in a store that was populated by the kinds of characters that inhabited my own stories turned an impossible dream possible in my mind.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)
Gosh. It’s such a long story. But the short version is that I pitched my book to my editor in the middle of a publisher spotlight at a conference and ended up with a request. But I really wanted an agent, so I continued to submit and be rejected by agent after agent, revising nonstop for two years. Finally, when I had run out of agents to submit to and faith that anyone would take my book on, I sent it off to my editor and got an offer within a week.
When the editor emailed me to make the offer, I refused to open the email because I had heard that you get The Call on the phone and I believed that if he had sent me an email that meant it was a rejection. So I waited for my husband to get home from work and made him open the email, because I really could not handle another rejection.
When he told me the editor wanted to know when he could call me, I lay down on my kitchen floor and sobbed.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
Really, anything that moves me. All I want when I read is to be touched. Deeply. I want to laugh and cry and feel something shift inside me. Reading is a risk-free way to access the entirety of your emotions. I believe that getting to understand and explore emotions in stories makes them more accessible in real life. And accessing your emotions is a huge part of living fully and mindfully. It’s why I love Romance and Women’s Fiction so much.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
I’m a HUGE movie buff, so that’s an impossible question. Nonetheless, I’ll say Dil Dhadakne Do, a Hindi movie about a family trying to reconcile their picture-perfect image with all the complications of real life. I love how well developed each character in the huge cast is. It’s the perfect romp, a lot of fun, but also, with important things to say.
15--What is your favorite season?
Summer. Feeling the sun burning my skin is one of my favorite things.
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Surrounded by family and friends eating, drinking, and dancing too much.
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
Jalsa on Amazon Prime and The Sex Life of College Girls on Hulu. Both incredibly well written and acted and completely different in mood and subject matter.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
As a sworn foodie I can’t answer that. All of them, even the ones I’m yet to taste, and also fusions that are well done.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
What’s that? Haha. Seriously though, whether or not I have free time I like to read, binge shows, hang out with people I love, travel, stare into space with my chai.
20--What can readers expect from you next?
I have a Women’s Fiction novel—THE VIBRANT YEARS coming in November. It’s three generations of Indian-American women researching dating apps together and finding out what it means to live life on your own terms.
The Rajes #4
Emma gets a fresh Indian-American twist from award-winning author Sonali Dev in her heartwarmingly irresistible Jane Austen inspired rom com series.
No one can call Vansh Raje’s life anything but charmed. Handsome—Vogue has declared him California’s hottest single—and rich enough to spend all his time on missions to make the world a better place. Add to that a doting family and a contagiously sunny disposition and Vansh has made it halfway through his twenties without ever facing anything to throw him off his admittedly spectacular game.
A couple years from turning forty, Knightlina (Naina) Kohli has just gotten out of a ten-year-long fake relationship with Vansh’s brother and wants only one thing from her life…fine, two things. One, to have nothing to do with the unfairly blessed Raje family ever again. Two, to bring economic independence to millions of women in South Asia through her microfinance foundation and prove her father wrong about, well, everything.
Just when Naina’s dream is about to come to fruition, Vansh Raje shows up with his misguided Emma Project... And suddenly she’s fighting him for funding and wondering if a friends-with-benefits arrangement that’s as toe-curlingly hot as it is fun is worth risking her life’s work for.
Multicultural Indian | Romance Comedy [Avon, On Sale: May 17, 2022, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9780063051843 / eISBN: 9780063051850]
Sonali Dev's first literary work was a play about mistaken identities performed at her neighborhood Diwali extravaganza in Mumbai. She was eight years old. Despite this early success, Sonali spent the next few decades getting degrees in architecture and written communication, migrating across the globe, and starting a family while writing for magazines and websites. With the advent of her first gray hair her mad love for telling stories returned full force, and she now combines it with her insights into Indian culture to conjure up stories that make a mad tangle with her life as supermom, domestic goddess, and world traveler.
Sonali lives in the Chicago suburbs with her very patient and often amused husband and two teens who demand both patience and humor, and the world's most perfect dog.
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